science communication studies

For dyed-in-the-wool academics it can sometimes be hard to understand what it feels to be a science amateur. So last spring I decided to become a member of Galaxy Zoo, i.e., one among many thousands of enthusiastic astronomy amateurs who spend hours in front of their computer screens, classifying about 900.000 images, provided by a project called the Sloan Digital Sky […]

The 3rd Annual Science and the Public Conference (in Manchester last June) was a very enjoyable affair (see programme here). Now, the 4th annual conference has been announced — this time in Brighton, 13-14 June 2009. The theme for next year’s meeting is ‘Science and the public: uncertain pasts, presents and futures’ and here’s the (maybe at trifle too […]

The next issue of the Vienna science magazine heureka! will feature an overview of the most evil, base, fraudulent and slimy scientists in history — a Hall of Shame — “um das breite Spektrum an ethisch verwerflichen und fragwürdigen Motivationen abzubilden”. Not only Nazi scientists, but all kinds of “Menschenhasser und skrupellose Experimentatoren, die übelsten Plagiatoren und Betrüger, die größten Neider […]

Science dancing goes back at least to the classic “Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level” performed at Stanford in 1971. And as the organizers of the 2009 Science Dance Contest say, the human body is an excellent medium for communicating science, “perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting”! This data-poor but body-rich contest […]

A rapidly increasing number of scientists and scholars are learning about the advantages of using the blog medium for both internal and external research communication — see for example Batts, Anthis and Smith’s recent paper “Advancing science through conversations: bridging the gap between blogs and the academy” in Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) (discussed in […]

In yesterday’s issue of Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) bioscientists Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith have an interesting article titled “Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy”. The authors notice that scientific institutions have been pretty slow to adopt the blog medium, in spite of the fact that […]

Our good colleague Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford has made an interesting observation about trends in science communication in the Times Literary Supplement (‘No strings’, March 28, pp.28-29). Reflecting on a number of newly published books on cosmology, Jim points out that the role of the individual science writer […]

Have said it before, and am saying it again: In the Pipeline is a damned good science blog. Why? Because Derek Lowe (a bench chemist in a pharma company) tells us about laboratory practice in a way that makes you feel you understand what the craft is really about. The posts almost smell and sound like […]

Here’s the audience gathering for the session on ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0’ organised by Gustav Holmberg for the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference (PCST-10) held in Malmö a month ago (read more on our joint session blog). And here’s my own paper for the event (responses are welcome, it needs a lot of improvement and re-writing […]

Participatory web media are increasingly being used for raising the medical scientific awareness of patients, caregivers and doctors (I guess this is the basic idea of ‘formation of biocitizenship’). Latest example is a video channel launched Monday by the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF in co-operation with YouTube: [biomed]H-rJgmVuV7Q[/biomed] with “the goal of promoting earlier diagnoses and getting more patients […]

A few minutes ago — as I was sitting in my beautiful and quiet room in Schokofabrik (the best B&B in Berlin), struggling with my paper on art and science in medical museums for the SLSA-session on Friday — a mail dropped in announcing a lecture by science writer Phillip Ball on Thursday 10 July, which may be quite interesting for us […]

Three reflections on the synthetic life conference in Roskilde in August. First, it would be great to bring the science/art perspective into the discussion. Art works inspired by the idea of synthetic/artificial life forms (like Reiner Matysik‘s) will probably contribute to the production and circulation of popular doxa in the field, which will in turn speed up funding of the research […]